Book 34: "The Limehouse Golem" by Peter Ackroyd

I have read this book a couple of times before and already knew who is murdered by whom, so this time I paid more attention to the historical characters who appear in this book. Karl Marx nearly gets himself murdered and George Gissing's real-life marital woes fit in well with the themes of this novel, while Oscar Wilde has a non-speaking part as a vain young author who makes sure he is noticed working in the British Library Writing Room. And of course there is music hall legend and pantomime dame extraordinaire Dan Leno, whose date of birth has been changed from 1860 to 1850, making him a teenager when his manager employs the young Limehouse Marsh Lizzie as a prompter in the mid-1860s, fifteen years before the Limehouse Golem murders.

Book 35: "Uncle Fred in the Springtime" by P. G. Wodehouse

Polly frowned. In a world scented with flowers and full of soft music, these sentiments jarred upon her.
'I don't see why it's got to be a sort of fight.'
'Well, it has. Marriage is a battlefield, not a bed of roses. Who said that? It sounds too good to be my own. Not that I don't think of some extraordinarily good things, generally in my bath.'

When his sister Lady Constance agrees to give his beloved Empress to the visiting Duke of Dunstable, for fear that he will trash the castle if he doesn't get his own way, the Earl of Emsworth turns to his brother's Gally's friend Fred, the Earl of Ickenham for help. Fred arrives at Blandings Castle disguised as distinguished psychiatrist Sir Roderick Glossop (who has been summoned by Lady Constance to examine the Duke), along with his nephew and a girl who is engaged to one of the Duke's nephews. As usual the story includes impostors infiltrating the castle, pignapping, a broken engagement, a jealous boyfriend getting the wrong end of the stick, and impoverished young men trying to get money from their richer friends and relatives. Uncle Fred is an alarming character who thinks it fun to try his hand at a confidence trick just to see if can do it, and is prepared to steal, cheat at cards and slip people Micky Finns, so for once I felt that Wodehouse's disapproving females could be right to keep their husbands and male relatives on a tight leash.

Book 36: "End of the World Blues" by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

"And just as Kit decided that perhaps it wasn't worth dying for a postcard of Amsterdam, his world exploded into a hurricane of white lace and scarlet silk, the mugger's gunshot going wide as the cos-play spun between Kit and the weapon, knocking it aside. Silver hair shook free and an ivory hair pin punched home, freezing a facial nerve as it ruptured the mugger's eardrum and entered his brain.

Lady Neku is a girl from a dying earth in the distant future, so far away that she doesn't know how far back in time she has come while running away from something terrible and forgotten. But she is also a teenage girl living on the streets of present day Tokyo, who is mysteriously in possession of a suitcase containing millions of U.S. dollars which she stores in railway station lockers. Like Lady Neku, bar owner Kit Nouveau is a runaway, not wanting to face up to his past or his present. He buys Neku a cup of coffee every day as she sits in the street near the Tokyo bar that he owns, and she saves his life when he is mugged in the alley behind his bar.

I have been thinking about how to describe the story without giving too much away, and it is difficult. Apart from the one time that Lady Neku cuts a hole in the air with her knife and disappears through it, nothing overtly unrealistic happens in the parts of the story set in the present day, and it is basically a convoluted tale of gangsters and the need to come to terms with your past. So I will just say that after a couple of narrow escapes from death, Kit Nouveau is advised that it will be safer for him to leave Japan for a while. This coincides with a woman who has always hated him tracking Kit down and asking him to come back to Britain to find the daughter she (or possibly her husband) refuses to believe is dead.

There are many ambiguous deaths in this book; suicides that may be murders or faked; and accidents that may be murders or suicides. Unless I missed something, it is never made clear who hired the original hit man who tried to shoot Kit in the alley. It doesn't seem to have been the Japanese gangsters, so could it have been Kate trying to have him killed but then changing her mind, or was someone else after Kit too? The author doesn't seem to be interested in tying up all the loose ends, so it is left to readers to make up their own minds and the book is none the worse for that.